Featured Artist – Sakinno Wu

Featured Artist

Sakinno Wu – San Francisco, CA
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Sakinno Wu is a contemporary artist and educator, born and raised on the east coast of China, currently residing in San Francisco, California. Her curiosity about the unknown and the new inspired her to experience the world through travel and exploration. Socrates said, “know yourself,” and her work has allowed her to explore the meaning of life itself. Studying abroad transformed her identity and art, while her background has retained her native Chinese sensibilities.

Sakinno’s experience as an artist has given her the opportunity to show her work in several venues and galleries in San Francisco, promotion in newspapers such as SingTao China, and to win the abstract award from the Academy of Art University in 2019. Being able to study abroad has also allowed Sakinno to communicate with, and travel between, cultural backgrounds and differences. Her understanding of the meaning of identity, in addition to her perspective and observation as a female artist, has inspired her to create a series of portraits of men and women, painting beyond the human body and committing to building an understanding of the depth of souls of women.

Through her exploration of femininity, and the mysteries surrounding the soul, Sakinno seeks to bridge the gap between the people viewing her paintings and the people inside them. Her art examines how the human body is, often, merely just a means for transporting memory and history. The total sum of each one of us transcends time, language and the limits of our own understanding. Through her paintings, Sakinno seeks to show our passage through time, how small each of us are, and also how important.

Human evolution has led us to sometimes choose to ignore, or forget, some of those natural states which we deem “unruly” or “unreasonable.” Through her work in collages, Sakinno always seeks to bring the unnatural back to earth. By taking images of human-made objects and reconfiguring them as plants, animals and people, whole new forms of life appear before our eyes. The nature of creation and natural selection is subversive by nature, and Sakinno relishes any opportunity to call attention to the anarchic nature of life and it’s strange course through the stars. Art has the ability to expand our minds, while also focusing our attention inward. Through it we are able to glimpse, if for just a moment, how interwoven the universe is, and how chaotic it can be. During her youth, Sakinno was fascinated by Ancient Greek anthropomorphic sculpture. The unrestrained personalities at play in these classic pieces is still an inspiration to her when she approaches her art. That narrow bridge between chaos and order, human and animal, is where Sakinno finds her inspiration.